IFAR Journal

The edited proceedings of a February 2015 IFAR Evening, where Emily Braun, CUNY professor and Leonard A. Lauder’s longtime curator, and Pepe Karmel, NYU professor and author of Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, discussed Lauder’s 2013 promised gift of 78 Cubist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The conversation focuses on the history of Cubist collecting, from pioneers such as the Steins and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, to Lauder himself, Mr. Lauder’s collecting philosophy, and stories from his decades of buying Cubist paintings.

The author, an attorney and violin maker, illustrates how wide publicity and the existence of specialized databases can lead to the recovery of stolen violins. In 2015, 35 years after it was stolen from the violinist Roman Totenberg, the 1743 Ames Stradivari was seized by the FBI and returned to Totenberg’s heirs. The article mentions other Stradivari violins that were stolen and then recovered, and still others that remain missing.

The author, an art law attorney, examines the differences between U.S. and European approaches to resolving Nazi-era art looting claims, including the absence of good faith purchaser rules in the United States and more stringent statutes of limitations in Europe.

The authors, IFAR’s art research director and executive director, discuss a painting submitted to IFAR’s Authentication Research Service for verification as an early Jackson Pollock but discovered to have been painted instead by his older brother, Charles.

IFAR’s art research director discusses a painting that was submitted to IFAR as a possible de Kooning but was identified as a fake that had previously been sent to IFAR as a purported Jackson Pollock.

John H. Merryman, a member of IFAR's Law Advisory Council for three decades and a professor at Stanford University Law School, is remembered by another art law specialist for his groundbreaking contributions to the field of art and cultural property law.

A summary of developments in the cases against Asian antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor. Following Kapoor's arrest in Germany in 2011 and his subsequent extradition to India, where he is currently awaiting trial, a joint New York state and federal investigation of Kapoor, "Operation Hidden Idol," led to the seizure of 2,622 Asian antiquities from Kapoor's Madison Avenue gallery and warehouses. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is now seeking forfeiture of the works. Museums and collectors around the world are in the process of reexamining the provenance of works acquired from Kapoor.

On June 18, 2015, a Basquiat painting and a Roman statue, formerly the property of Banco Santos founder Edemar Cid Ferreira, were repatriated to Brazil. These works, along with three others returned in 2010 and 2014, were seized on the grounds that they were imported into the U.S. illegally after Brazil requested worldwide assistance in locating Ferreira’s assets.

An update on a case covered previously in IFAR Journal. A federal district court ruled against the heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer and in favor of the Thyssen Bornemisza Foundation on a question of jurisdiction in a long-standing dispute over Pissarro's Rue Saint-Honoré, après-midi-effet de pluie. The heirs have appealed the decision.

A summary of events in a wire fraud case against California real estate developer and art collector Luke Brugnara, who was convicted in May 2015 and will face sentencing later in the year.

A federal judge in New York declined to extradite Alexander Khochinsky, a Russian citizen currently in New York, to Poland . Poland has accused him of unlawfully acquiring Antoine Pesne's Girl with Dove (1754), looted from the Wielkopolskie Museum in the city of Poznan during WWII.

Stolen items include Richard Pousette-Dart's Small Presence; two paintings by Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton, stolen from a museum in Brussels, Belgium; six medieval stone heads stolen in Dorchester, England; and prints by Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Ruscha, and Robert Williams stolen in Malibu, CA.

Missing items include three works on paper by Johann Georg Müller missing from an archive in Duisberg, Germany; and a Bust of Diana by Jean-Antoine Houdon, missing in transit from the National Museum, Warsaw, to Krakow on November 1, 1940.

Recovered items include six paintings stolen from a museum in Amsterdam in 1972; a Picasso etching, Buste de femme à la chaise, stolen in Stamford, CT in 2012; and a sculpture by Rodin, Young Girl with Serpent, stolen from in Beverly Hills, CA in 1991.